Miss Julie

“ MISS JULIE – Mary Barnidge, Chicago Reader 6/18/92 – ?Five reasons why even a professed Strindberg hater might have stayed all night at At the Gallery-Chopin Theatre watching Zbigniew Zasadny’s production of Miss Julie:

(1) Zasadny uses the Ingmar Bergman adaptation of the play, which makes extensive use of action to reveal character. The production also includes two dance sequences. All of which permits much cumbersome and unnecessary dialogue to be excised.

(2) The streamlined script gives the actors time to introduce their characters gradually, allowing us to get to know and sympathize with them. The actors have obviously given their characters’ motives and experiences great thought, and are able to present us with whole, identifiable personalities.

(3) Most actors tend to play the characters of Miss Julie as mature adults, though the script gives Julie’s age as only 25; Jean and Christine are about the same. The young actors in this production, by transferring their youth to the characters, provide us with an analogy to the class distinctions and social barriers of 19th-century Sweden. The innocence and helplessness of youth make Julie’s confusion at her bizarre family history and subsequent suicide plausible. This Julie could be seen today, ‘luded out at Belmont and Sheffield on a Saturday night. Their youth also makes Jean’s dream of owning his own small business and Christine’s home-girl piety immediately recognizable to modern audiences.

(4) Shawn Coyle’s jazz-ballet-fusion dances fairly sizzle with the midsummer sensuality that will prove the characters’ undoing. Ditto the incidental music selected from such diverse sources as Kitaro, Villa-Lobos, and Peter Gabriel.

(5) The young cast–Amy Elizabeth Flaherty as Julie, Eric Virkkala as Jean, and Sheila Willis as Christine–are still fresh enough to take visible pride in their work, a quality that wins our respect and admiration.